Issue #20

We found the opportunity to ask our questions to Okay Karadayılar before the shambles of the festive holiday about the Booklab project founded by Okay Karadayılar and the galerist Kerimcan Güleryüz and on photobooks.

We intended to have a conversation with Orhan Cem Çetin on photobooks. Our aim was to talk about "Bedava Gergedan" and "Kara Kutu Cep Kitapları." We were lucky and a different conversation opened up with other photographers talking or listening.

This article was firstly published in the 6th Issue of Yet Magazine in 2014. The original content was translated from English to Turkish by Nazlı Deniz Oğuz for our special Photobook Issue. You can reach the original text in here.

The text below is based on the conversation called "Photobook Education in Universities" we had with Aslı Narin within the scope of Istanbul Photobook Festival on 29th May 2016. Within the last 2 years, we have re-scheduled the lecture "Photography and Narration" given by Murat Germen and Melis Bağatır in Sabancı University with a focus on the production of photobooks. Likewise, Aslı Narin also gave a similar lecture in Kadir Has University. Once in every semester we worked collectively by doing professor exchanges, arranging collective sessions and exchanging ideas within the process. Although this essay focuses more on the experiences in Sabancı University, I will also include the benefits we had through our collective work into the content. Consequently, I aim to share and encourage the experiences we had within these 2 years, and forming new collectivities.

Kill Memories is not only a digital experimentation of practicing art through found objects, it is also a book that is based on solid questions, a book that is really appealing in its richness in terms of its method, aesthetic and content.

What I know about photonovel was limited to what I know from my parents. My mother used to tell me about the times how she and her friends read and exchanged photonovels in summers when she was a student, and my father used to tell me off like "so what, are you going to put a makeup and read photonovels at home" when I complain about business life. To me, photonovel is something to pass the time in summers, a fun activity smelling sand and sea. When I read that photonovel was considered in these terms in Ayfer Tunç's book "Bir Maniniz Yoksa Annemler Size Gelecek: 70li Yıllarda Hayatımız(1)" I was a bit relieved and sad at the same time. Though I saw and admired these books which were replaced by romantic TV series today, in secondhand bookshops and flea markets, and started collecting the ones I like the photos of. I did it spontaneously, without ever questioning what I did or what photonovel is to this day. Until I participated in Markus Schaden's - one of the founders of Photobook Museum - photobook workshop, and he asked me to donate my photonovel which I brought with me to The Photobok Museum.

Let me say this first: Even though I am excited in this update which is focused on photobooks, to host many competent people in their respective fields, it also paralyzes me as one of its regular writers. Because I fear that I might not fill this space in which I try to join the others who filter and contemplate their ideas on a subject I don't really have a solid grasp of.

Our agenda is photobooks. Even though it is brought up repeatedly nowadays just like a pop song, actually the lyrics hasn't been written yet. There were people who studied and analyzed the subject, contemplated on it and incorporated the medium into their artistic practice well in advance. As for me, I became familiar with it recently, and I have to admit that the photobook as a medium preoccupies my mind continually in terms of its style, technique and materials as a designer and an editor, along with its content.

A sheet of heavy duty plastic, piled high with books that encompass everything from popular page turners to self-help guides, strangely one of the bestselling genres in Turkey, is a common sight in Istanbul. The number of these pirated books cannot be underestimated. Mostly these Turkish translations are printed as facsimiles at printers on the periphery of the city and, for a middle class household with a heavy reading habit, these pirate book sellers offer an important way out.

There may be an extraordinary sense of showcase when one looks at our geography from abroad, from the outside; a climate in which three seasons can be experienced at once from time to time, a marvelous nature, being surrounded by three seas, having some of the most important places where civilization was founded, countless ethnicities, languages, cultures...

I have picked Fatma Belkıs' "Those Who Left" and "Those Who Stayed" about a year ago, to discuss in the book club in BAS gathering once a month. In this gathering we try to meet once a month whenever possible, and think about one of the photobooks in BAS collection, I kept going round in circles to explain the main idea behind these books and failed.